The Stump at Ground Zero

In October 2001, workers clearing the wreckage at Ground Zero discovered a Callery pear tree buried beneath the rubble. It was barely alive — an eight-foot stump, its roots charred, its branches snapped down to nothing. By every reasonable measure, the tree was finished.

But the New York City Parks Department refused to give up on it. They transported the shattered trunk to a Bronx nursery, planted it in rich soil, and waited. For years, caretakers tended what looked like a dead thing. Then, slowly, green appeared. A single shoot pushed through the blackened bark. Then another. By 2010, the tree had grown to thirty feet tall and was replanted at the 9/11 Memorial, where it stands today — full-canopied, flowering every spring, surrounded by four hundred newly planted white oaks.

They call it the Survivor Tree.

Isaiah saw something similar, but on a cosmic scale. The dynasty of David had been cut down to a stump — the royal line reduced to a peasant family in Nazareth. Yet the prophet declared that a shoot would spring from the stump of Jesse, and from that unlikely growth would come a kingdom where wolves and lambs rest together, where children play safely near the serpent's den, where the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth like water.

God has always done His finest work through stumps the world has written off.